Thursday, January 17, 2008

Teleportation: fact or fiction?

Making someone vanish in New York and appear an instant later in Tokyo is way beyond current technology but just might be possible in the far future, physicists told an audience at MIT attending a preview and panel discussion about the movie Jumper on Wednesday.

Actor Hayden Christensen and director Doug Liman were at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, US, to show scenes from the upcoming movie and to discuss it with physicists Max Tegmark and Edward Farhi.

In the film, a young man played by Christensen discovers he has the ability to instantly teleport himself across the globe. He uses the ability to rob a bank before getting caught up in a war pitting other "jumpers" like himself against a group that wants to kill them. Click on the image below to watch the trailer.

I was expecting the physicists to say that trying to teleport something as complex as a human being would be totally out of the question. So I was surprised when they said they wouldn't rule it out, even if it is way beyond current technology.

Physicists have teleported individual particles of light called photons across distances of more than 3 kilometres, according to Farhi (below, right), who heads MIT's Center for Theoretical Physics, and have also teleported particles of matter such as electrons.

He said that it should not be too difficult to increase the distances to thousands of kilometres or even interstellar distances, but that teleporting something as complicated as a human, as opposed to single particles, would be much more difficult.

"That really is pretty far down the line," he said. "A living creature probably has 1030 [1 followed by 30 zeros] particles in it ? and to get all the information about that to some distant location looks really pretty formidable. I cannot see that as something in the reasonable future."

Farhi also pointed out two limitations of this technique, which is called quantum teleportation. One is that it requires particles to be sent ahead of time to the location you want to teleport to. These particles are what take on your essence to reconstruct you in this location when you are teleported. Secondly, even quantum teleportation takes time ? the signal that carries the information used to reconstruct you cannot move faster than the speed of light. However, if it were one day possible to teleport a person, down to the quantum state of each of their atoms, he said the teleported person at point B should have exactly the same thoughts and memories as the person whose quantum state was destroyed at point A.

The other physicist on the panel, Max Tegmark (above, left), pointed out another possible way to transport things quickly across space-time. The laws of physics allow for the existence of "wormholes", which are distortions in the fabric of space that can link two distant locations.

If you could build and take such a shortcut, you could go faster than the speed of light and also time travel, Tegmark said. Unfortunately, he says, the trip could be quite gruelling, as wormholes tend to be quite unstable. "It could collapse into a black hole," he said, "which would be kind of a bummer."

Tegmark later asked Christensen how scientists could be more helpful to filmmakers. "Watch Jumper, get inspired by it, and get to work and figure [teleportation] out," he replied.

Given Christensen's previous role in the Star Wars series, the physicists were also asked to compare the scientific realism of that series with that of Jumper. "I would guess that you would have a light sabre weapon before you will teleport a person," Farhi said. Tegmark wondered how one would build a light sabre: "The only hard part about the light sabre is getting the laser beam to stop."

A few clips of Jumper were shown. I wasn't expecting anything great, because I had not been impressed by the trailer, which seemed higher on enthusiasm than impact. But the scenes we saw developed the story more and did a better job of drawing me in, even if they still seemed a little cheesy in places.

Having said that, I don't have a problem with a far-fetched premise if it makes for an enjoyable movie. I'm hoping Jumper will take the teleportation idea in interesting directions, but that remains to be seen.

Friday, September 14, 2007

Review: In the shadow of the Moon

When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface in July 1969, I got in big trouble. In the excitement of that long-awaited moment, this eight-year-old-in-a-cowboy-hat fired off both barrels of his double-barrelled pop gun. My dad got pretty mad because he then had to wait to hear Armstrong's immortal words repeated by the TV guy. ("One giant POP! for a man, one giant POP! for mankind" ? wasn't it?).

That experience of watching the Eagle landing and first lunar excursion ? on a black and white, two-channel, wooden television ? came barrelling back through the years last night as I watched a screening of In The Shadow Of The Moon, a movie that digitally splices together reel after reel of previously unseen NASA film footage of the Apollo Moon shots.

From "right stuff" training to rocket engine plumbing to flaming stage jettisons and lunar frolics, it's a true visual treat for space fans. The movie has just opened in US theatres but doesn't open in the UK till early November.

What's really cool about it is that it lets many of the 12 astronauts who flew to the Moon tell their story in their own words, in face-to-face interviews and as compelling, informed, wise voiceover on some truly jaw-dropping film footage. "Perhaps the most astonishing thing to me about this project is that this film had not already been made," says director David Sington. "The best thing about it has been meeting and talking to ten of the most remarkable individuals I have ever met."

And they are remarkable ? with Michael Collins, pilot of Apollo 11's command module Columbia proving a real star. As the guy who would not land on the Moon, but keep the spacecraft orbiting to take the Moonwalkers home, you might expect Collins to have been a little disappointed ? but far from it. He seems happy to have been part of the pioneering crew and his acerbic asides and revealing stories are really the meat and drink that make this film the hearty meal that it is (watch the trailer below).

So how did the producers get the new footage?

From the production notes:

"Producer Duncan Copp and co-producer Chris Riley spent many weeks in the NASA film library examining cans of film - some of which had not been opened for over 30 years. This search uncovered many gems, including astonishing space shots which have been re-mastered from the original film rolls to reveal the Apollo program with a visual clarity and impact it has never had before. The mute 16mm rolls shot in Mission Control have been laboriously lip-synched with the 16-track audio recordings of the mission controllers' voice loop to re-unite the pictures and sound of many historic moments for the first time, lending a striking immediacy to many dramatic scenes.

"The film has some stunning shots in space of the spacecraft separating and docking. This was engineering footage shot so that the engineers could investigate the cause of any problems ? in effect a sort of visual "black box recorder". There were cameras built into the various stages of the Saturn V rocket which would automatically shoot key moments, usually at high frame rates on 16mm film. The cameras would then eject (you can see this happening on one particularly spectacular shot of the final stage firing) and re-enter the atmosphere, where they would be caught in mid-air by high-flying aircraft equipped with nets! It's an amazing story we plan to tell in one of the DVD featurettes. One of things we wanted to do was really allow the audience to luxuriate in this amazing footage ? and so some shots we play in their entirety."

But, in a film chock-full of derring-do and the triumph of human innovation in the face of near-impossible odds, there's one poignant moment of unalloyed melancholy.

Astronaut John Young relates the story of the terrible loss of the three-man Apollo 1 crew in a capsule fire during training. Echoing latter-day NASA management and communication worries after the shuttle disasters, he says the Apollo 1 crew had questioned the wisdom of using a chaotic, exposed wiring harness that could potentially cause sparks in the 100% oxygen atmosphere of the spacecraft. But the astronauts, he said, felt too afraid of losing their place in the space programme (the media had made them national heroes simply for being selected) if they made such a complaint. It seems to have cost them their lives.

That latter point on safety engineering comes midway through the film, but it is, for me, the take-home message. Even JFK's famous speech announcing the initiation of NASA's Moon programme mentioned the concept of safety, when he talked of returning people "safely to the Earth" after a Moon shot. The issue is especially important to keep in mind now as more and more companies vie to send people to space. As the late Richard Feynman put it in the report on the Challenger disaster: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Was John Philip Sousa obsessed with Venus?

Astronomy has some surprising devotees. While listening to NPR this weekend, I heard a fascinating astronomy-related story involving US composer John Philip Sousa (1854-1932), who's famous for such marches as "Stars and Stripes Forever".

Calling themselves the "Alimony Club", these men have sworn off love (NPR characterises them as "down on their romantic luck" but others claim they're misogynists). They think they're on a stag cruise, safe from the perils and mere presence of women. But of course they are mistaken, and when they discover a female stowaway on board, they become hopelessly smitten and vie for her affection.

But it would be great to know whether this Hollywood movie would end happily ever after. Do any of the men sweep the stowaway off her feet? If so, how? (By whispering sweet nothings about Venus's sultry tango with the Sun, perhaps? How do astronomers woo their mates?) And what is this charming stowaway running away from in the first place? To anyone with a rare copy of the book, inquiring minds want to know?